The trans-atlantic battery bunny divide

This somewhat frightening armature is the base for the iconic energizer bunny. While we love seeing the guts of popular robotics, this brings up an interesting fact. In Europe, the bunny is the symbol for Duracell. There’s an interesting story where Duracell had used the bunny for years in europe, only to inspire Energizer to copy them stateside in 1989. This one will be available on ebay shortly.

21 thoughts on “The trans-atlantic battery bunny divide”

@all, re: “devide”
I scoured the article and could not find this. Left, came back and scoured again. At the point that I was sure this was a conspiracy to make me go insane, I realized it was the title. It is now fixed, the world is in order, you can breathe a sigh of relief.

Sortakinda. Energizer wasn’t copying Duracell – they were mocking them. The Duracell bunnies were little inoffensive drummers. This was an ad – at least in the Midwest US – for Duracell at the same time.

Energizer’s response was a big sunglass-wearing, bass-drum-pounding, attitude-having bunny, in the inaugural ad campaign which may or may not have come from a Superbowl ad, the Energizer bunny plowed through all the Duracell bunnies as they ran out of juice and fell over. The director yelled ‘cut!’ but the bunny kept going, and started plowing through “other commercials” which were being shot at the same time in the same studio. You would see ads ostensibly for some long distance service, and the bunny would plow through and knock over the divider in the middle of the screen between ‘here’ and ‘there’ – that kind of thing.

James is dead on…
Duracell’s ads showed lots of toys running with different batteries. The toy with Duracell went the longest. Energizer responded showing with a similar ad showing their battery lasting much longer. Then they started into the annoying ‘still going’ ads and the Energizer bunny has been going ever since.
Or it’s a Europe hating conspiracy…

Well, this is nothing new; America has been stealing European ideas for decades. Just turn your tv to TLC, HGTV, or any other Discovery network (Trading Spaces was probably the biggest, “inspired” by Changing Rooms on BBC). Never expected this though. Originality FTW XD